Do You Like To Boogie Woogie?

Do you like to boogie woogie? sang Madonna on Music, the pedant in me wanted to say, ‘Yes, I am particularly fond of the work of Jimmy Yancie and Pete Johnson*, so beat me mama, eight to the bar!’, but the less wanky side of me ignored the words and recognized a damn brilliant dance tune when it heard one.  So, being rather fond of shaking my booty, I duly bought the 12″ and doubled my Madonna collection in one fell swoop; she rates quite highly on my list of Top 20 Humans I’m Not Fond Of, but she can certainly bang out a good tune.

First off Music contains the album version, the ‘Deep Dish Dot Com Remix’, the ‘Groove Armada Club Mix’ and the ‘Groove Armada Ba 12 Mix’ – all in all it clocks in at … (does maths) … a few seconds under 30 minutes**, basically that’s almost 1.5 Van Halen LPs.  So value for money, but is it all any good.  Well, surprisingly, yes.

The Deep Dish mix kicks off Music and it is damned good, harder, more bass-focused and far more anthemic than the original.  It takes Madonna’s simpleton message about music and togetherness and welds it into a pretty damn unstoppable beat behemoth – I’ve definitely danced to this whilst out and lasted most if not all 11:21 of it; check out my stamina ladies, is all I’m saying.  It makes great use of stop/start and drop out sections and builds and builds and builds hugely.  I can’t say I spin this very often, but should I ever find myself running a hot club night out of my garage then this would definitely get played out^.

The LP version of ‘Music’ is even better.  As always you have to wonder about the extent of Madonna’s input and whether her talent, apart from self promotion is that of identifying great collaborators to work with.  At this point it was Mirwais Ahmadzaï, my all-time favourite Swiss/Afghani/Italian electro producer^^, who has to be given the credit for this gem which conjures up the experimentation, camp and sheer exuberance of disco in its hey day but without any slavish copying and a harder drive.  Cher aside, I do have a bit of a thing for vocoders – hell, I’m not going to apologise for the way the lord made me, deal with it.  It is just a great slice of pop.

Those Groove Armada coves deconstruct the tune a little more, but not to such powerful effect, the Club Mix is okay but the 12″ Mix is just a mess – by adding strings and messing with the beats it just detracts from the groovy minimalism of the original track, missing the point entirely.

So there you go, that was my Halloween boogie last night whilst watching You’re Next.  It was fun and Madonna gets 1537 bonus points for making reference to the social class who own the means of production and whose societal concerns are the value of property to ensure the perpetuation of their economic supremacy.  Word up.

Music makes the people come together
Music mix the bourgeoisie and the rebel

601 (Get) Down.

*that bit is true, my piano teacher taught me boogie woogie for about a year before I eventually gave up.  ‘Roll ’em Pete’ is sheer, pure gold genius, with or without, Big Joe Turner:

**the legal limit for a single in the UK market.

^along with that Donna Summer one I own and then I’d probably just resort to spinning ‘Word Up’ by Cameo until everyone collapsed in an ecstatic heap, or wandered off, bored.

^^his album Production had some very good moments.